Use The Groove. Let Go.

When I was getting ready to get my blog up and running I had to write my “About” page. I was 99.9% sure I was going to call my blog “About The Groove”, so I decided to do some online research to see what others had to say about “the groove”.

Much to my dismay most articles and posts about “the groove” tried to give it a scientific calculated definition. Most of these articles were provided by professors and engineering types (and I don’t mean recording engineers).

Leave it to the intelligentsia to take something as ethereal and beautiful as “the groove” and try to define it as a formula or some complicated scientific equation. In other word, suck the life out of it.

See why I have such a disdain for engineers (again not recording engineers). It’s what they do. They take simplicity and turn it into a cesspool of complications and explanations that feed their egos. They turn it to the dark side.

Anyway to me “the groove” is simple.

When you play you know when you’re in it and you know when you’re out of it.

Once you start to experience it you want to be there again and again.

It’s the same with life.

You’re in and out of your groove. When you’re out of it all you want to do is get back into it.

The groove can run very, very deep.

It’s so much more than as described in Wikipeida, “the sense of propulsive rhythmic feel or sense of ‘swing’ created by the interaction or the music played by a band’s rhythm section.”

Hell my car can give me a rhythmic feel, so can a train and so can a band playing in time. But the groove grabs you and carries you away. The whole band finds it and gets in it not just the “rhythm section”. The audience consciously or subconsciously is pulled into it.

“The groove” is a spiritual thing not a piece of engineering.

Don’t try to graph it or collect and study data on it. You’ll never find it if that’s how you see the world.

To paraphrase Obi Wan:

The groove is what gives a musician his/her power. It’s an energy field created by the song. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.